Tiny, tiny, tiny ants

The other morning there was some sort of bone on my driveway, apparently garbage-picked from my neighbor's trashcan and left by raccoons. I thought it was strange that there was still some of the Shake 'n bake-looking coating on it -- the raccoons would have eaten all of that, wouldn't they?

Well, upon closer inspection that wasn't a tasty breaded coating on the bone -- it was a covering of tiny ants!

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These are very small ants. I know what you're thinking: "yeah, we know ants are small". These are not normal ant size.

They are miniscule! Teensy. Nearly microscopic.

They're all over this section of the driveway concrete:

Can you see them? I know where to look and I still have a hard time seeing more than a couple of them.


Here's a shot from a lower angle, about as zoomed in as I can get:

Those "boulders" are just the tiny rocks that are in the concrete. It really looks different at this scale, doesn't it? (Macro photography is really interesting to me, and I hope to be doing more of it in the future.)

I've seen these tiny ants before, over on the stairway landing where I planted the thyme in the cracks between the patio flagstones. They were just making a trail there, and there was no indication of their destination at that time -- there were definitely no bones laying around.

The thing about these ants is you don't see them unless you're really close to the ground, so you don't usually see them. I'm not sure what kind of ants they are, but they are pretty fascinating to watch, since they really crowd together.

I ended up leaving the bone there for the ants, with the intention of picking it up later in the day. I completely forgot about it and it was gone the next morning, so the raccoons must have given it another go. I hope they liked the taste of these tiny ants

Actually, I doubt if the ants were still around by the time the raccoons came out, but I kinda like the mental image of baby raccoons smacking their lips because of the tasty ants. Tangy!